“The greatest charity one can do to another is to lead him to the truth.” -St. Thomas Aquinas

Sunday Devotional: The Son of Man – 11/25/2018

~Eowyn

Fellowship Of The Minds

“The greatest charity one can do to another is to lead him to the truth.” -St. Thomas Aqui

Daniel 7:13-14

As the visions during the night continued, I saw
one like a Son of man coming,
on the clouds of heaven;
when he reached the Ancient One
and was presented before him,
the one like a Son of man received dominion, glory, and kingship;
all peoples, nations, and languages serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not be taken away,
his kingship shall not be destroyed.

I once took a graduate course in modern Christology from an esteemed theological school.

One thing that baffled me was why Jesus referred to Himself as the “Son of man” instead of who He is, the Son of God. In fact, Jesus referred to Himself as the “Son of man” some 84 times in the New Testament. An example is Matthew 9:6:

But that ye may know that
the Son of man
hath power on earth to forgive sins

So I asked the professor, a scholar and Catholic priest, who, uncharacteristically, said he didn’t know.

But the answer is in the passage above from the Book of Daniel, chapter 7.

Jesus referred to Himself as the “Son of man” to indicate that He is precisely the eschatological figure that the Old Testament had prophesied to come at the end of time, who has “everlasting” “dominion” and “kingship” over “all peoples, nations and languages”.

John 18:36-37

Jesus answered, “My kingdom does not belong to this world.
If my kingdom did belong to this world,
my attendants would be fighting
to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.
But as it is, my kingdom is not here.”
So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?”
Jesus answered, “You say I am a king.
For this I was born and for this I came into the world,
to testify to the truth.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Daniel 7 is but one instance in the Old Testament‘s foretelling of the incarnation, persecution, mocking, and death-by-crucifixion of Jesus, the Son of God. Other instances include Wisdom 2:12, 17-20; Isaiah 7:14; Numbers 27:14; Micah 5:2; Jeremiah 23:5; Zechariah 11:12; and Psalm 22:1, 16, 18.

As St. John wrote in Revelation 1:5-8:

Jesus Christ is the faithful witness,
the firstborn of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth.
To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood,
who has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father,
to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.
Behold, he is coming amid the clouds,
and every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him.
All the peoples of the earth will lament him.
Yes. Amen.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, ” says the Lord God,
“the one who is and who was and who is to come, the almighty.”

But the learned Hebrew scribes and rabbis simply refused to acknowledge that Jesus is the “Son of man” whom their Torah (Old Testament) amply foretold. Not only did they reject Jesus as the Christ, they drove Him out of town, tried to throw Him off a cliff (Luke 4:29), and eventually used proxies to kill Him, who committed no crime, by the most tortuous and cruelest form of execution that the Romans reserved for the worst criminals.

If that isn’t an overreaction on a demonic scale, I don’t know what is.

Note: In psychology, overreaction is defined as a response that is more strongly, over emotional, violent and exaggerated than is necessary or appropriate. Being exaggerated and off-the-scale, overreaction is an irrational response to a stimulus, which points to some underlying dynamics within the individual’s psychology.

No wonder He called them the spawn of Satan.

Jesus, I love You with my whole heart, my whole soul, my whole mind, and with all my strength.